School's in Session at Google

By

Joseph Walker

Updated July 5, 2012 2:17 p.m. ET

Google Inc. Chief Executive Larry Page has spent the past year trying to bring a renewed sense of urgency and focus to the search company, in what he calls putting "more wood behind fewer arrows." Playing a big part in that effort to battle threats from Facebook Inc.,FB-1.26%Apple Inc.AAPL-0.87% and Amazon.com Inc.,AMZN-0.11% is GoogleEDU, the company's two-year-old learning and leadership-development program.

GoogleEDU is formalizing learning at the company in an entirely new way, relying on data analytics and other measures. Joseph Walker reports on digits. Photo: Getty Images.

ENLARGE

Google CEO Larry Page
Reuters

GoogleEDU is formalizing learning at the company in an entirely new way, relying on data analytics and other measures to ensure it is teaching employees what they need to know to keep profits humming.

Last year, Google offered more classes to more employees than it ever has before, with about a third of its 33,100-strong global workforce going through the in-house program. It cut classes that didn't work and retooled others. "What's important is that it aligns with our overall business strategy," says Karen May, Google's vice president of leadership and talent, who has led the revamping of GoogleEDU.

Companies have long sought to boost their employees' performance through training and leadership programs. U.S. businesses spent $171.5 billion on learning and development in 2010, the most recent year for which data is available, according to the American Society for Training and Development. General Electric Co.GE-0.08%, for example, spends $1 billion annually on training and education programs for its employees, according to its website.

ENLARGE

A Google logo is seen through windows of Moscone Center in San Francisco.
AFP/Getty Images

Getting these programs to work, though, is tricky. Management experts say it is all well and good to send employees to classes, but to get the lessons to stick, employees need to apply them to their daily work lives. Employees often take a class and "say, 'Gee, this is great,' and go back to their jobs and do the same old thing," says Professor David Bradford, director of the executive program in leadership at Stanford University.

Google thinks it has found a way to make its learning stick. It has become more exacting about when it offers classes and to whom. It uses employee reviews of managers—similar to the instructor reviews that college students fill out at the end of a semester—to suggest courses to managers. Ever data-obsessed, Google uses statistics gathered from current and former employees to recommend certain courses to managers at different points in their career, say after a move to a new city or joining a new team.

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The revamp of Google's training programs is particularly critical now. The company, with $38 billion in annual revenue, hired 8,000 employees last year, the biggest annual head-count increase in its history. As part of revamping GoogleEDU, the company's people team (they don't call it human resources in Silicon Valley) also began thinking about how to better integrate the influx of new employees, made up of managers as well as rank-and-file staff.

Experienced managers who join Google from other companies can find it difficult to operate in a culture where power over subordinates is derived from one's ideas and powers of persuasion, not job titles, says Ms. May. Decisions on promotions and raises are often made by consensus among peers and superiors. An employee isn't necessarily going to obey a manager just because he or she is a manager. This is radically different from most traditional corporations, which have a top-down, hierarchical style of management.

"There's a lot more persuasion involved because Googlers are really smart," says Scott Lederer, a former Google user-experience designer who left the company in 2011. "They are not going to do something for you just because of your title. You really have to make your case."

Thus Google offers a special class for new managers and executives where they are taught how to exert influence in more subtle ways, says Ms. May. "One of the practicalities of a less hierarchical company is that you aren't necessarily going to have the position power to decree something or dictate something," she says.

Google has also begun offering specific classes based on an employee's work area (engineering versus sales) and career stage (junior developer versus senior manager). "The more targeted it is, the better, because it is specific and actionable," says John Baldoni, president of Baldoni Consulting LLC, a leadership coaching-and-development firm based in Ann Arbor, Mich. "The downside of leadership development is that it is too often amorphous and doesn't speak to people in the language that they need at a specific time."

Rather than train a new manager in how the Google performance evaluation process works as soon as they are hired, they'll instead receive the training just before performance reviews begin. If a manager is taking on a new team member who is transferring from a Google office in a different location, he or she will receive an email as a reminder that new employees have said it is helpful when managers introduce them to others in the office or review the team's goals with the new employee.

"More individualized, customized recommendations are part of how, as we grow, we're trying to individualize and personalize the learning experience here," Ms. May says.

Google won't reveal its attrition rate or what impact the revamped GoogleEDU has had on retention or employee morale. "We do see in our overall satisfaction scores that it does make a difference when we invest in people," says Ms. May.

The company's focus on learning has long been apparent to employees, some of whom say they were offered more classes at Google than at any other company at which they've worked. Jason Morrow, who left Google in 2010, says that continuing education is "baked into the culture" of the company.

Even before the formation of GoogleEDU in 2010, Google would assign promising young product managers career and management coaches who would teach them how to negotiate better salaries, improve their presentation skills, or talk through the reasons why someone should or shouldn't leave to found a start-up, remembers one former employee who left the company in 2007. He says that such programs "engendered a lot of loyalty" among employees.

"We work really hard to get the right people," says Ms. May. "We want them to reach their full potential."

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